Sunday, Sept. 5: On to Venice…

This morning our bus headed south and crossed from Austria into Italy via Brenner Pass. 

For lunch we stopped at Egna, a small town in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy.  This far north, the communities are an interesting hybrid of Italian and Austrian.  Apparently people speak both languages.  But Austrian seemed to be more in evidence on signs around town, even though we were in Italy.

We ate lunch at an outdoor café, and across the town square a community band was playing.

Each table of four shared a really pretty salad, and then we each had a sampler of three different types of Panini sandwiches.





 

 Then, of course, since we were now in Italy there was the gelato stop on the way back to the bus!

When we got to Venice, the plan was to take one of the large water “buses” up the Grand Canal to our hotel.  But there was a Regatta happening on the Grand Canal and no regular boat traffic was allowed.  So Daniela quickly negotiated for passage in several water taxis, and then all of us, with bags, piled onto these various smaller boats for a wild, misty ride that  truly lived up to the Rick Steves tour motto:  “Europe Through the Back Door,” as our little boats left the harbor and made their way up a small canal to the point where they deposited us to walk through a very narrow alleyway to finally reach our hotel.

And soon we were mugging at each other from the windows of our room at the Hotel Serenissima.

In the evening Daniela took us to St. Mark’s Square.  That first glimpse of St. Mark’s was pretty impressive, even with renovation barriers covering parts of it.

We had a group dinner that night at the Agli Artisti... 

After dinner went back to St. Mark’s Square to listen to the various small ensembles playing in front of the various restaurants on the square, which was kind of cool.



Then we ended the evening with a gondola ride.  By hiring several boats and riding as a group, we were able to ride relatively “cheaply” for 24 euros per person.  So apparently those gondola rides are a little pricey. 

But, hey, we got serenaded by an accordion-and-singer combo that rode in one of our boats.  And yeah, when we were on the Grand Canal, you bet he sang “Volare!”   And people in every gondola that passed us, even those who were not in our group, were singing along.  It’s one of those songs.